


Anxiety

by Haberdasher



Category: Original Work
Genre: Anxiety, Anxiety Disorder, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-24
Updated: 2017-01-24
Packaged: 2019-09-23 22:09:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 608
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17088647
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Haberdasher/pseuds/Haberdasher
Summary: A story based on the prompt "Upon reaching maturity, young adults gain the ability to control what they fear most."





	Anxiety

Sara’s parents has nice, clean-cut fears and powers. Sara’s mother had been petrified of snakes as a child, but now had power over them; Sara’s father had been deathly afraid of drowning, but now could control water. Both had grown accustomed to their powers over time, had gone from fear to acceptance, and were eager to see their daughter go through the same process.

Sara’s fears, unfortunately, were not so simple.

People asked all too often what her greatest fear was, trying to anticipate her power before it naturally emerged, and when she didn’t just make up an answer, Sara struggled to explain what it was she feared. There was no one  _thing_  that terrified her, no single word or phrase that encapsulated her every fear. The worries that flitted through her mind were endless: she was afraid of snakes like her mother (who wouldn’t be, deadly as they could be), and of drowning like her father (more common than people realized, a quiet killer), and of a thousand other things besides. Every step she took could be her last, she knew; any moment, she could trip and fall and bleed to death, or have a sudden heart attack, or somebody could run up and stab her, or a plane could crash right on top of her. The world was a dangerous place, and Sara couldn’t point to a single factor that made it so, to a single thing that she feared more than any other.

Sara was diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder two months before her eighteenth birthday.

It was a tense time. Therapy helped, a little bit, but not enough. Medication was tempting, but the timing was wrong- not only did doctors hesitate to prescribe medicine to one so young, but when it was so close to when her powers would emerge, they were hesitant to potentially interfere with the process. (The old tale of the brave boy who feared nothing and thus went through adulthood without any powers was repeated to her time and time again.) Sara, for her part, couldn’t have cared less about her powers’ natural development. She just wanted to stop feeling so afraid, to have her mind fill with hope as much as it now filled with worry.

Sara had a fitful sleep the night before her eighteenth birthday, thinking of all the ways her power emergence could go wrong, how horribly the next day could go.

When she woke up that morning, she could tell that something was different. She could feel a strange sort of connection, like her mother described her own constant awareness of the nearby snakes, a new sense overlaid onto her existing ones. But what Sara was sensing with it, she couldn’t quite tell at first. There was no one thing screaming out at her to be noticed, just a general sense of presence, of belonging.

She tried to reach out to what she sensed-

A barrage of small objects bombarded Sara, flying onto her bed from all across her room. A quick search revealed that the attack included pens, small stones, figurines, earrings, and one children’s book.

Sara sat there for a moment, idly turning over one of the pens in her hand as she tried to piece together what the underlying connection between this seemingly-disparate set of items was.

It took her a long while to realize that what she was trying to find didn’t exist. There was nothing in particular that united these objects, no more than she could find one single thread to unite the barrage of fears that had plagued her all her life.

It was everything.

She could control everything.


End file.
